They were in Southampton and, frankly, the news was so good that I leaped from my bed, where I’d been napping, and rushed to the sink to trim my nose hairs. Ear hairs too, inasmuch as I am able.
Thanksgiving, I realized soon after, was for O’en, who, if truth be told, has been languishing a bit with us geezers. We don’t run, we don’t wrassle, we don’t play with him endlessly, and he needs it. He needs the company of kids. He is playful, as are they. I can hear him say it, yes I can, unleash me, set me free.
How Mary ever retrieved him that late summer evening in Beach Hampton when he dashed through Ruth and Gary’s gate and took off into the warren of Scheffer houses, neatly set into the dunes, I don’t know. But she did. She came through, just as she has this Thanksgiving, having spent, she said, seven days putting everything in order. “Just like God,” I said. “Except, unlike Him, you get no day of rest.”
Well, to some extent she did, for this year everyone pitched in, Gavin, who cooked the turkeys, first and foremost.
“Mercy and truth are met together, righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” The general said that in “Babette’s Feast,” before an incomparable dinner, and so will I should I seize the occasion. If no, I’ll be silent, which, in the end, when everyone’s talking, is the best thing, though it’s taken me, a card-carrying member of the chattering class, a long time to simply shut up and listen.
What is it I have to say anyway? I’m still trying to figure it out. Henry Haney said it’s all what you make of it, and I’m still wondering what do you make of it. “Life, I repeat, is energy of love,” Wordsworth said, and that’s good enough for me. Enough of that and there would be far less evil — which Blake defined as restraint of others and restraint of oneself — in the world. All should be creativity — as Mary just did in making the house a welcoming place where mercy and truth can meet, and where righteousness and peace can kiss each other.